Using Gels for Creativity
I love color in my photography and OCF lets us introduce some amazing colors through the use of gels. Gels can be used for creative purposes as well as color temperature correction but 99% of the time I'm using it for creative reasons only.
Gel experts if you want to go further
A set of basic gels can be less than $10. I have a few gel related exercises coming up in the challenge so we'll definitely dip our toes into gels a bit, although gel photography is a whole course unto itself. Lindsay Adler and Jake Hicks are two photographers I am inspired by and they both offer complete courses on using gels. This self portrait shoot is full-on Lindsay red!
So here are some of my favorite ways to use gels:
#1: Changing your background
Backdrops are expensive and I don't have many, so I use gels all the time on a gray or white background just to change up my color options. This is the easiest way to use gels and we will be doing this in the OCF Challenge so stay tuned!
#2: With a Fog Machine
Okay folks. Tell me what is more fun than combining gels with fog? Nothing. That's absolutely right. I will not apologize for breaking this one out when it's not even remotely near Halloween. I will not.
But of course it is super fun at Halloween as well:
#3: In combination with long exposures
I used purple gels on a modeling light during a long exposure to create our stuck-at-home COVID New Years Eve dance party vibe.
#4: To Invoke Color Theory
I use gels like this blue/orange combination to create mood, drama and utilize complimentary color schemes in an otherwise boring garage image of my girl with her new bike.
In this image with my daughter below I was trying for a triadic color scheme.
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
#5: Turning white light into blue
In this images I didn't use a blue gel. I changed my white balance to tungsten/lamp light which shifts the light to a blue hue (your camera is trying to compensate for what you just told it is warm orange light and its trying to get you back to white). I added a warming CTO gel to my key light in order to make sure my skin tones were warm. This technique really makes more sense when outside and all the ambient light turns really blue, while keeping warm skin tones but I took this in April 2020 when we were not really leaving our house and I wanted to reflect my mood and concerns. This is the same idea as using gels for color correction, although I was still using it for creative purposes in this case.
Using Gels for Color Correction
I confess I rarely ever do this but here's the most simple scenario where I would: when you have lamps on in a room casting a warm orange tint in your photos that you don't want. Your flash is daylight balanced so probably around 5500 kelvin, while the tungsten lights are much warmer around 3200. So you can add a gel to warm up your flash, since that's certainly easier than trying to gel all the other lights in your room, and then set your WB manually to tungsten or a specific Kelvin in order to have them match up.
Tips for working with gels:
Play, play, play! Gels add another element and they can be challenging to control precisely so just start experimenting.
You can gel any background but I find that gray or white work best. Gray produces more saturated colors while white produces a lighter more pastel version.
If your color looks washed out, try turning the flash power down.
Flag your flash to avoid unintentional color contamination where you don't want it.
The red channel blows out first so use caution when using red or deep pink gels on skin and expose for the highlights so you don't lose details
What if you don't have gels or don't do OCF?
If you're not sure if you want to buy a set of gels, there are other ways to introduce colors into your photography without OCF. In this image from a business trip to Chicago a few years ago there was some amazing purple light coming from the tower so I pulled up a free softbox app on my tablet and set it to a similar purple and let that light spill across the hotel bed. I didn't have a tripod so the camera was on the bed too.
If you have an IceLight or something similar (I have a knockoff one), you can use that for creating mood, as this image capturing my youngest always trying to evade bedtime.
Thanks for looking!
